All week long I have been trying to express my feelings about the killing of a TV crew in Roanoke, VA.
All week long I have not been able to articulate why it hit me so hard.
To explain I have to go back to November of 2011.
At the time I had two former co-workers I really liked living in Des Moines.
One was Mark Tauschek, the best guy you could ever hope to work with, a great human being, and the whole package news-wise.
The other I did not know quite as well. I had briefly worked with Bobbi Silvernail at Cable 12 News in Brooklyn Park, MN. We had socialized at a baby shower. But months after she left the station, I was up for a promotion and she called management to put in a good word for me. That put her high on my list of classy colleagues.
So I was online and saw a headline, "Former Des Moines TV Anchor Dies."
My blood ran cold.
I knew it was one of my friends. Either Mark or Bobbi.
It was Bobbi.
She had passed suddenly due to some unusual pregnancy complications.
I let our friend Carol Bowdry know, she had worked with her longer, and I remember her disbelief so well.
Flash forward to this week.
Earlier this month 3 of my friends moved to Roanoke to work in news.
My co-worker and "protege" Amanda Kenny was headed to WDBJ. My best friends from WNEP-TV, Bill Wadell and his girlfriend Amy Brodrick, were headed to the competition.
We had all chatted about what a very small world news is on Facebook and I followed their moves across the US on social media.
Wednesday morning I saw a notification on my iPad that a reporter and photog in Roanoke had been shot and killed.
Admittedly I didn't think Bill or Amanda was working mornings, but this time of year schedules get scrambled. I have filled in on several morning shifts in the past days.
I can't say I had that heart-stopping premonition that I had about the Des Moines headline, but it was too close for comfort.
Even if you don't have three friends working in news in Roanoke, the crime was unthinkable.
A reporter and photog, making the best of a preview interview, filling a morning show.
It is the job often given to beginners at a station, but it is really the hardest. You are basically using your personality to compensate for the fact that not much is going on.
Yes, it was horrifyingly on live tv, but it was also a workplace shooting.
The workplace Amanda had just started in so recently. The city Amy and Bill had just moved to.
Those first days in a new market are like a courtship, everything is fresh, you explore your new hometown like you explore a new romance. The little things are thrilling. There is so much too see, so many people to meet, and you are a blank slate.
That would no longer be their experience.
I texted with Bill. I didn't want to disturb Amanda.
Amanda always very sweetly made a point of telling me how helpful my knowledge had been to her in the start of her career.
We had gone through an awful flood in Binghamton together. We were hungry and tired and emotional and I can remember her wanting food from Ground Round in the worst way but we were all living on junk.
I worried how Amanda would cope, in a new workplace, in unimaginable circumstances. The new kid at a station filled with grief and stress.
I watched her reports, a little shaky at noon, but then at 5:00 CNN dipped in just as she was starting to report the lead story on the worst day WDBJ will ever have.
She was perfect.
A jump shot with nothing but net.
She later told me she had no idea she was on televisions across the nation.
I have tried to be helpful over the past few days, even if it was texting her my cock-eyed and inept attempt at taking a #WeStandWithWDBJ picture.
On Friday I went back to work, relieved to be distracted from my sadness.
I found out at the last minute I would be filling in in our Pocono Newsroom.
My first story involved a school construction problem.
My second gave me chills.
I would be doing a preview of Wally Lake Fest.
Like Allison Parker and Adam Ward I would be standing on a deck, over looking a man-made lake, interviewing a chamber of commerce official about an upcoming festival.
At first I thought I could use gallows humor to laugh off the coincidence.
But as I was on that deck over looking that lake my emotions swelled again.
After the interview, as Dan T. got the last shots I sat in a rocking chair and silently cried.
I didn't have to imagine what Allison and Adam were doing before they were attacked, I was doing it.
Even though I have been communicating with Amanda, I have no idea how the WDBJ crew is getting through this.
There is grief, then there is grief in the center of a media firestorm, and by the way you are the media.
Amanda is a centered lady who can do yoga poses I can only dream of, but I worry whether this trauma will linger with her.
Bill and Amy have each other and Piper the world's funniest hound, but I feel so sad their honeymoon phase in Roanoke will be forever marked by death.
We have all lost a bit of innocence. It started with the obscenity shouting photo-bombers making a spectacle of shaming women while they report the news. But now any illusion that a live camera can protect us is gone.
I have to say, I am not afraid to do live shots.
I still believe auto accidents are the biggest risk we face. We are in the snow in unfamiliar territory, or we step out of a truck and run towards the news forgetting to look both ways.
One of my favorite books is The First Hour I Believed by Wally Lamb.
It deals with the way a Columbine witness experiences trauma.
I recall a character talking about circles, and a ripple effect.
Amanda may be the closest to the center, with Bill and Amy by her side, but we are all feeling this.
We are all still trying to wrap our heads around it.
It took parts of my brain a long time to realize the World Trade Center wasn't there anymore. Not the TKTS booth, not Windows on the World, not the great big Citibank branch. But eventually my brain caught up with reality.
When it comes to the unimaginable deaths of a morning reporter and photographer, I still have a way to go.
